Archy Dvd » Connor Mower's Review

At first, I wasn't sure what to expect from this film, never really watching documentary style surf films before, but more importantly, I'd never even heard of Matt Archbold before, which after watching this, I realized was more ridiculous than I first thought.

From the off, you could tell this film was trying to pump across as much knowledge about Archy as it could. This meant, very quickly I was learning about him and what he was about. I started to realize how much of an important role Archy played in developing the introduction of youth into pro surfing. This documentary was put together extremely well, in a way that makes it easy to understand, unlike some documentaries where i find myself trying to keep up. The one thing that did worry me about this film, was the price at £22.50. I thought that was fairly steep, but thinking about it, it is justified. The amount of work that must have gone into finding so many shots of Archy growing up is mind blowing. There's so much footage, of surfing, even when surf photography was still in its early days. This film really does capture everything that is Archy, but this means it also captures the lows of his life, which in itself, near the end when Archy talking, is fairly emotional, but no so emotional that it ruins the vibe of the film.

So I would say this film is definitely worth a watch if you like documentary type surf films. This is only the second film of this type I have watched, and I've loved both of them, so if you haven't seen one of these yet, it's definitely worth a go.